According to the Court of Rome, naturalisation delays can affect children's citizenship rights

According to the Court of Rome, administrative delays in naturalisation can affect children's citizenship rights

Italian citizenship proceedings can take years. During that time, a child may turn eighteen, raising a difficult question: should the administrative delay in deciding a parent's naturalisation application deprive the child of a possible derivative citizenship entitlement? A judgment of the Ordinary Court of Rome dated 5 May 2025 addressed precisely this problem.

The facts behind the dispute

The claimant was a young adult whose mother had applied for Italian citizenship by naturalisation while he was still a minor. By the time the authorities completed the process and invited the mother to take the oath, he had become an adult. The authorities rejected his claim to citizenship under Article 14 of Law 91/1992, which governs the acquisition of citizenship by certain minor children of a parent acquiring Italian nationality.

What the Court decided

The Court of Rome upheld the young person's claim. The reported judgment confronts the consequences of an administrative procedure that extended beyond the claimant's eighteenth birthday. Its significance lies in refusing to treat the passage of time caused by the administration as necessarily extinguishing the position claimed by a child who was a minor when the parent's application began. It should not be taken to mean that merely filing a parent's naturalisation application automatically gives citizenship to every child: the timing, statutory conditions and relevant family circumstances remain crucial.

Why the chronology matters

Applicants should keep evidence of when the parent filed the naturalisation application, the child's date of birth, the date of the naturalisation decree and the date of the oath. The child's residence and family circumstances must also be documented. These dates can be decisive in assessing whether a late administrative decision has adversely affected a right claimed under the citizenship legislation.

What families can do after a refusal

If an authority denies citizenship because the child reached majority before the parent's procedure concluded, request the written reasoning and preserve all relevant records. A lawyer can review the decision against the specific wording and temporal application of Article 14, the subsequent changes to citizenship law and the judicial interpretations. A court judgment in another family's case is a useful precedent, not an automatic guarantee of the same outcome.

A broader administrative lesson

The case illustrates how delays in public administration can change a person's legal position while an application is pending. Citizenship is subject to statutory requirements, but the state must also administer those requirements consistently with judicial guarantees. The difference between a condition genuinely absent and one allegedly lost because of administrative delay deserves careful legal scrutiny.

Judgment and source

Ordinary Court of Rome, judgment of 5 May 2025, regarding derivative citizenship under Article 14 of Law 91/1992. Source and case discussion: Melting Pot Europa, 25 May 2025. A judgment number is not provided because it has not been independently verified.

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Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Lawyer authorised to practise before the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation
Registered in the Italian Chamber of Deputies' register of interest representatives in the field of immigration
Registered lobbyist in the European Union Transparency Register, no. 280782895721-36, in the field of Migration and Asylum
ORCID: 0009-0004-7030-0428

This article was prepared with the assistance of AI tools under the author's direction, review and editorial responsibility.